Inside Health

By DANNY HAKIM

Published: January 15, 2007

Gov. Eliot Spitzer is not the highest paid state employee. Not even close.

That was evident enough after the Spitzer administration released its list of top staff salaries on Friday, led by the $340,000 compensation package for Elliot Sander, the new executive director of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

But going a step further, there are actually more than 100 state workers whose pay exceeds the governor's $179,000 salary, according to data obtained from the state comptroller's office.

So who's at the top?

Depends on how one counts, but Alain E. Kaloyeros, the well-regarded professor at SUNY's University at Albany and chief administrative officer of its College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering , makes the largest base salary.

Dr. Kaloyeros, 51, left, drives a black 2004 Ferrari 360 Spider and earns a cool $525,000 a year. Born in Beirut to a Lebanese French mother and a Greek father, he does have a formidable r?m?- look no further than the Ph.D. in experimental condensed matter physics from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

He is also a visible figure in the capital, credited with helping transform the Albany region into a high-technology hub and a research center for his particular bailiwick, nanotechnology. And he is frequently courted by foreign countries and the governors of other states; a person other than Dr. Kaloyeros who is familiar with his employment situation said that it would not be a surprise if he left his post soon for a job outside the state.

So is he worth half a million taxpayer dollars a year?

''My daytime job is to compete with M.I.T., Stanford, and I like to think we're giving them a run for the money,'' Dr. Kaloyeros said. ''My compensation as a professor is designed to reflect that job.''

He said that his counterparts at other top universities get smaller salaries but are able to reach total compensation well into the seven figures because ''there are a lot of things they can do that I cannot do because I am a state officer.''

Dr. Kaloyeros said he avoids serving on corporate boards or doing consulting work because there could be perceptions of a conflict of interest.

And the Ferrari? ''That got paid for by my royalties from patents,'' he said, including one that relates to developing special coatings in semiconductors that allow for the use of copper wires instead of aluminum wires.

In terms of total compensation last year, Dr. Kaloyeros is dwarfed by Dr. Robert C. Lowery, a professor and chief of cardiothoracic surgery at the State University of New York's Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn.

Though Dr. Lowery makes a base salary of $400,000 for his work as a professor, he also gets far greater case-by-case compensation for his clinical work: open-heart surgeries and the like. In 2006, he earned more than $1.3 million.

''We did a survey of the market when he was hired and found that was the rate that was appropriate for him,'' said Ron Najman, a spokesman for the hospital, adding that ''top cardiothoracic surgeons are extremely skilled and gifted people.''

The doctor declined to comment.

As for the salaries of the governor's new team, for the most part they were unchanged from the pay scale of the Pataki administration. The largest salaries among the appointees were officials at the public authorities. Some of the notables include Anthony E. Shorris, the executive director of the Port Authority, who will make $277,000, and Avi Schick, president of the Empire State Development Corporation, who will make $213,000.

The full list released by the administration can be found at http://empirezone.blogs.nytimes.com/.